How come Blender does not reconize a mesh from my makehuman program?
First: It would be helpful to know exactly which version of makehuman and exactly which version of blender you are using. The advice on how to proceed will be different depending on these answers. 

At least DAE should work out of the box for exporting a makehuman character to blender, although material transparency might need to be tweaked after import. 

This said, the recommended approach for exporting a character from makehuman to blender is still MHX2 rather than FBX or DAE. MHX2 has been ported to blender 2.80, but the import button is now available on the T-shelf rather than in the import menu. 

I would thus recommend trying to get MHX2 up and running rather than try working through FBX or DAE, when the end target is blender. 

As an alternative, and if you are using makehuman 1.2.0 alpha 2 or later, you can use the new blender integration to import a fully rigged character. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAwfR-G813g for a general introduction and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEaVZVbTJOQ for notes specific to blender 2.80.